Really short movie reviews: Wolf of Wall Street and Noah

Last night, I finally watched last year’s 3-hour-long The Wolf of Wall Street, which purports to tell the true story of Jordan Belfort, a guy who got rich beyond his wildest dreams of avarice thanks to the empire he built by fraudulently selling worthless penny stocks. The film garnered a great deal of attention when it opened because it showed the debauchery of Jordan’s life, as well as the life his fellow get-rich-quick traders lived. There were beaches full of cocaine (apparently the actors sniffed up powered Vitamin B), mountains of Quaaludes, oceans of alcohol, and swarms of naked prostitutes, as well as few tossed dwarfs. It wasn’t titillating, it was mind-numbing.

As I commented to my husband, the movie was too much debauchery and too little plot. By the beginning of the third hour, I was desperate for the FBI to move in and just arrest the guy so that we could all be put out of our misery. Unless you are a glutton for punishment, I recommend that you skip the whole movie and just watch the first and last half hours, which will tell you everything you need to know about one crook’s rise and fall.

Also last night, my son saw Noah, a movie that has aroused the ire of traditional believers because of the way it turns God’s message and moral on its head. While my son couldn’t care less about whether the movie twisted the Bible, he does care about good entertainment. This was not, in his estimation, good entertainment. Or as he said, and I quote, “Noah was a terrible movie. It was really stupid and boring. It was the worst movie I’ve ever seen.”

When I pressed him for details, I got a garbled recital about Noah’s stupid belief that he had to kill all of humankind, about his plan to murder his grandchildren, about unbelievable bad guys and animated rocks, and generally about a frenetic, yet boring, mess of a movie. This was a two thumbs down and then some.

I believe Wolf of Wall Street broke the f bomb record. When it comes to movies, I tend not to mind profanity too much if it’s a comedy (The Big Lebowski) but if its a drama (Goodfellas) my ears start to hurt.
I sometimes long for the Hollywood Code days. They forced writers and directors to be creative. Watch Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear and then watch Robert di Niro in the remake. Mitchum oozes evil from every pore and doesn’t utter one f bomb.

lee

Robert Mitchum was great–oozing evil from every pore is a great description.

I also like how the sexual tension is so much BETTER in the older movies, before people started hopping in to bed at the drop of a dime. It took more talent to show evil and sex without nudity and four-letter words.

There was a lot I liked “The Big Lebowski,” overall it really was a very good movie, but I found the overuse of the “f word” gratuitous and off-putting. That has made me not terribly inclined to watch it again. And I watch movies MULTIPLE times. Just because I have seen a good movie once, twice, eight times, does not mean I don’t want to watch it again… Once was enough for me of “The Big Lebowski.”
It always amazes me whenever I watch “The Godfather” or “Dirty Harry” — they were rated R, and they are so much cleaner and less bloody than today’s PG movies! (Sonny’s romp with the bridesmaid shows no nudity; the horsehead is the bloodiest scene. Though the guy getting through the eye is gory, too.)

The entire Left is made out of wolves eating the sheep in Wall Street.

A lot of the female actors weren’t simulating attraction towards the star actor in the orgies. They were really in to it, like Democrat fanatics or fans in the presence of an idol god. This seemed really annoying to the star of the wolf movie from a source on the stage.

Thus illusion becomes life, and life illusion.

Life is hard, then you die, and Hollywood is cra. Death and taxes, both are perpetual. Perpetually in vogue. Perpetually invoked.

I see somebody has been picking movies to “indoctrinate” the children of the Bookworm household. Due to teenage hormones, teenagers Obey Authority the most, are susceptible to fear and hope propaganda the most during that period of time, and often lack the self control needed to harness emotions and hormones for the greater good.

I completely forgot what I was going to write about when logging on here. I’ll get back to it later.

lee

Even before your review, I was not terribly inclined to go see “Wolf of Wall Street.” I read an interview with the unrepentant **** on which it is based. I have no doubt he is probably making money, somehow, someway, on this film. I don’t know how the film ends, but in real life, the **** does go to prison, for less than two years, and now makes 30K a pop for his “motivational speeches.” The Lame Stream media also apparently books him for commentary.

It’s disgusting.

lee

Oh, yeah… His prison pal was Tommy Chong, who hooked him up with more famous people to pave his way to a nice comfortable life style. And that $100+ million in restitution he was SUPPOSED to pay? The Feds aren’t seeing that much of his $1.5 million annual income…

Until your children feel even an ounce of the same hatred we do, Book, reason is a pathetic armament for fighting a war.

Emotion is its own strength. It needs no “facts” and no political ideologies.

sabawa

You posters are like good stock brokers (is that an oxymoron??) b/c you save me lots of dough. I’ll pass on both movies, thanks.

jj

Couldn’t sit through Wolf – it was just awful. I’m fortunate in some ways: living in the middle of nowhere it’s a 30 mile round trip to the theater, which spares us a lot of crap. We have to be pretty sure we really want to go. This particular piece of crap arrived in a DVD for consideration a couple of months ago, and even in the comfort of my own surroundings, and well-fortified, I couldn’t do it. I ended up on the floor with the dogs.

Noah is far from my favorite Old Testament character, which shouldn’t be a surprise. The Old Testament is so well stocked with genuine lunatics he actually looks fairly pedestrian. Boring, in fact. Which is probably the problem whoever made the film faced, too, which is why they tarted him up and did whatever it is they did that so annoys whoever’s annoyed. I’m not interested enough to be annoyed, and will miss it, both now, and again if it shows up in the mailbox next winter.

GingerB

Haven’t seen either of the two movies, and probably won’t, but these reviews reminded me of two related things that I enjoyed. My favorite “Leo” movie was What’s eating Gilbert Grape? in which he plays a mentally disabled young boy. IMO he should have won an Oscar for supporting actor.
An enjoyable fictionalized book about Noah’s Ark was Madeline L’Engle’s Many Waters.

GingerB: I was just telling my daughter about Leo’s performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? I hadn’t heard of him before and actually thought that they’d find a handicapped actor to play the part. Leo was only 14 or so at the time and he was that good.

GingerB

I worked in a Middle School and he was an absolutely perfect match for “my children.” I don’t keep up with movies too much and I actually didn’t see it until last year on DVD. You’re right- he was that good. I think my mouth dropped open several times, and I got a little teary-eyed from nostalgia.
Read you every day!

I have no interest in either movie, but I’ve always been fascinated by the flood story, which many archaeologists think may have a basis in fact.

One theory I’ve seen discussed that has many proponents is of a giant flood in the Black Sea, probably around 5,000 BC (maybe sooner—I’m typing this stuff from memory), the result of the catastrophic collapse of a natural dam that had been holding back cubic miles of meltwater left over from the end of the Ice Age.

It’s possible that a story got passed down through the generations by the survivors of such a flood. When Mt. Mazama in what is now Oregon blew its top off around 5700 BC, stories told by eyewitnesses got passed down to the modern era. Anthropologists reported hearing legends from Indians living in the Cascade Mountains of a great explosion that later created Crater Lake.

Maybe the wildest surmise about the flood is one I read a couple of years ago by a hydrologist who said it might be possible that there really was a global flood. His theory is that as the Ice Age ended and glaciers melted, much of the meltwater was caught behind giant ice walls as the glaciers melted from the inside out. At some point—he estimates 12,000 years ago—walls along one glacial front collapsed, creating a domino effect across North America and Europe as neighboring glacial walls were too weak to withstand undermining from the sudden arrival of gigantic water flows along their bases.

The collapse released thousands of cubic miles of water, which he estimates could have raised global sea levels by 30 feet virtually overnight. While there wasn’t enough water to cover the entire earth, there was enough to leave a lasting impression on coastal dwellers almost everywhere on the globe—thus the perplexing existence of a flood story in so many disparate cultures.

I’m not sure I buy into it, but it’s a fascinating account that tries to explain a myth in plausible terms. I love it when somebody puts his mind to an old problem and applies a new twist.

Jutland theory between Sweden and England is that ocean levels rose by 5 cm per year. But it was enough over time to submerge areas that were otherwise the key basis for fishing economies. The forced migration inward thus led to various myths and creation legends.

Various atlantis myths going around. If a higher power or God tried to communicate this to people back then, I doubt the full information could have been transferred.

Spartacus

Drive south for several miles out of McMinnville, OR, and on your right you will see a rock maybe the size of a dinner table up on top of a hill that is maybe 200′ or 300′ tall. If memory serves, the rock is from Montana, deposited there by one of the Missoula Floods. They thought Bretz had lost his marbles when he first proposed the idea, but geologic history is chock full of some pretty amazing stuff. (Not having heard the full story, I assume that the rock did not tumble up there on a firehose of floodwater, but more likely floated there inside of an ice chunk.)

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